YORK COUNTY — A 16-year-old boy was critically wounded when a sheriff’s deputy shot him during an armed standoff at an apartment complex Sunday evening.
York-Poquoson Sheriff Ronald Montgomery said the teen had pointed a gun “in the direction of deputies” when another deputy — who was not in the line of fire at that point — fired three rounds with a sheriff’s office rifle from the rear right side of the teen.
The teen was struck twice in the lower abdomen about 15 minutes after the deputies arrived.
“Once he went down, deputies moved in and secured the firearm that he had,” Montgomery said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “And we immediately began first aid.”
Medics from a York-Poquoson Fire Department ambulance that was parked outside the complex came to the scene. “We had a medic that was staged at the time, so they were there on scene almost immediately as well,” Montgomery said.
The teen was still in the intensive care unit at the hospital Monday afternoon, listed in critical condition. “We’ve been checking on him several times a day,” Montgomery said.
Deputies confiscated the weapon, a 9mm handgun with an extended clip that was holding about 23 live rounds, Montgomery said. One round, he said, was found on the sedan’s floorboard.
It all began, Montgomery said, when the sheriff’s office got a call Sunday afternoon from one of the teen’s family members, “who had been alerted by another family member” that the teen “just didn’t seem to be right.”
The 16-year-old lives with his family at the Claremont Apartment Homes, off Route 17 a few miles south of the Coleman Bridge.
“Then we got calls from several of the residents out there who actually were victims of the gun being pointed at them,” Montgomery said. One resident, he said, told deputies that the laser sight from the teen’s gun went “across her face.”
“So the gun was actually pointed at her head at some point,” Montgomery said. The woman had four children in the complex’s playground, “and she was concerned that they were going to be shot.”
When deputies arrived at about 6 p.m., they found the teen in the passenger seat of a gold Honda that was backed into a parking space across from the building where the teen lives with his family. He was the only person in the car.
“He still had the handgun in his lap,” Montgomery said. “So the deputies backed off. Multiple deputies arrived on scene and cordoned off the area and began trying to talk to this individual.”
An overhead map that Montgomery showed of the apartment complex marked the spots where eight sheriff’s deputies were at the scene. They watched the teen from four or five vantage points. The sheriff said the teen never spoke with the officers.
Deputies spoke with the teen’s sister, who was able to connect with him on FaceTime. The sister was “working with us to try to resolve the situation,” and “trying to get him to leave the gun in the car and get out of the vehicle.”
But the teen didn’t speak to her, either. Deputies kept trying to negotiate with him, asking and ordering him “dozens of times” to get out of the car. Finally, Montgomery said, the teen came out on the passenger side holding the gun and phone in one hand.
“He put the cellphone down at one point and picked that back up,” Montgomery said. “But he never did relinquish the firearm and waved it around in the air multiple times. He never responded verbally to anything that we said.”
Montgomery then asked the media at the news conference to stop recording and not take pictures for what he showed next: Small snippets from recordings by two citizens, one from a Facebook Live stream, that showed the leadup to the shooting.
The footage, still posted on Facebook, showed the teen putting something — presumably the cellphone — on the hood of the car, as two deputies crouched down behind a car in the foreground.
“Drop it, man! Drop it!” a deputy called out.
The teen then appeared to make a motion toward the rear of the car, where Montgomery said officers were situated beyond a small playground.
It was difficult to make out the gun on the footage, with Montgomery pointing several times to the firearm to show the media its location. One of the videos appeared to be taken from more than 40 yards away, while the other was partially obscured by a black metal fence surrounding the playground.
Montgomery said he didn’t want to show the footage of the teen being struck.
“The body cam video is better,” Montgomery said. “But the problem is, I’m not going to show you the actual shooting. And that’s how quick it is … When he starts to go in that direction, and the deputy realizes which direction that round’s gonna go … he shoots him.”
After the deputy fires three rounds, the Facebook Live footage showed about eight officers surrounding the teen, with one running toward him with what appears to be a black medic’s bag.
The teen — who attends high school in York County — moved with his family from another area city, with neighbors saying the family moved into the Claremont Apartments about two months ago.
The deputy who shot the teen has about five years of experience in law enforcement, Montgomery said. He worked for another local police department before starting in York County just over a year ago. The deputy is on administrative leave with pay while the shooting is being investigated.
Montgomery said investigators are now looking into whether the teen might have been under the influence of drugs, which is what his family believes.
“This was not his normal behavior was how it was originally described to us,” he said. “He just never engaged anyone verbally, not even his sister. … He never said a word.”
A woman did not answer the door at the teen’s family’s apartment, saying through the door that she didn’t want to talk with a reporter.
But a neighbor in the building questioned the police use of force. “It sucks,” the man said. “That the response was shooting. They should have Tased him or used pellets. That wasn’t even attempted.”
Another neighbor, a 37-year-old woman, said she was one of the ones to call the sheriff’s office after the teen was “openly and freely holding the gun” as he walked around.
“It was enough to make my daughter feel threatened,” she said.
Reporter Gavin Stone contributed to this report.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
